Slashdot Mirror

Excellent crack you're smoking there. Mind if you tell me where you got it?

Works fine for me

Schedule 1.1(a) Assets

1. All rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare and Auxiliary Products, including but not limited to all versions of UNIX and UnixWare and Auxiliary Products [...] including source code, [...]

Schedule 1.1(b) Excluded Assets

V. Intellectual Property:

A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the [...] copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies.

Answer: do anything you can to keep the case in limbo - including filing another lawsuit and using that as an excuse to delay proceedings.

However, looking at the date of when the suit was filed, it is dated January 20, 2004... they were supposed to hand-over the code that "SCO owns" and code that was improperly included into Linux by IBM with specificity to the court by January 13, a full week before that suit was filed against Novell.

There is no excuse (if they actually know what the hell they own code-wise) that they couldn't obey the court order, and supply the information that was requested of them. Didn't SCO say all along that they had proof of code misappropriations by IBM into Linux? SCO was supposed to satisfy interrogatories 1, 2, 4, 12, and 13, which are [1]:

INTERROGATORY NO. 1: seeks specific identification of all alleged trade secrets and confidential or proprietary information that SCO alleges IBM misappropriated or misused. This information is requested by product, file and line of code.

INTERROGATORY NO. 2: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 2 seeks further identification of: (a) all persons who have or had rights to the same; (b) the nature and sources of SCO's rights in the same; and (c) efforts to maintain secrecy or confidentiality of the same.

INTERROGATORY NO. 4: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 4 seeks information regarding each instance in which plaintiff alleges that IBM misappropriated or misused the same. In particular, this interrogatory seeks (a) the date of the alleged misuse or misappropriation; (b) the persons involved; c) the manner of misuse or misappropriation; and (d) the location of any method or code in any IBM product, Linux, open source or the public domain.

INTERROGATORY NO. 12: Please identify, with specificity (by file and line of code), (a) all source code and other material in Linux (including but not limited to the Linux kernel, any Linux operating sytem and any Linux distribution) to which plaintiff has rights; and (b) the nature of plaintiff's rights, including but not limited to whether and how the code or other material derives from UNIX.

INTERROGATORY NO. 13: For each line of code and other materials identified in response to Interrogatory No. 12, please state whether (a) IBM has infringed plaintiff's rights, and for any rights IBM is alleged to have infringed, describe in detail how IBM is alleged to have infringed plaintiff's rights; and (b) whether plaintiff has ever distributed code or other material or otherwise made it available to the public, as part of a Linux distribution or otherwise, and, if so, the circumstances under which it was distributed or otherwise made available, including but not limited to the product(s) in which it was distributed or made available, and the terms under which is was distributed or made available (such as under the GPL or any other license).

[1] The above Interrogatories were taken from Groklaw


SCO knew all along, before the court date in December, that Novell was contesting the ownership of SVRX. This may be why Novell only filed copyright and not a suit against SCO, since they probably didn't want to ruin any chance of SCO being squashed in the January 23 hearing.

Either way, the Judge better hand SCO's ass to themselves for their conduct in this case, especially the dribble of an excuse that was given for not complying with the cort order. Hell, just throw the suit out of the window, and let SCO battle it out with Novell.

Answer: do anything you can to keep the case in limbo - including filing another lawsuit and using that as an excuse to delay proceedings.

However, looking at the date of when the suit was filed, it is dated January 20, 2004... they were supposed to hand-over the code that "SCO owns" and code that was improperly included into Linux by IBM with specificity to the court by January 13, a full week before that suit was filed against Novell.

There is no excuse (if they actually know what the hell they own code-wise) that they couldn't obey the court order, and supply the information that was requested of them. Didn't SCO say all along that they had proof of code misappropriations by IBM into Linux? SCO was supposed to satisfy interrogatories 1, 2, 4, 12, and 13, which are [1]:

INTERROGATORY NO. 1: seeks specific identification of all alleged trade secrets and confidential or proprietary information that SCO alleges IBM misappropriated or misused. This information is requested by product, file and line of code.

INTERROGATORY NO. 2: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 2 seeks further identification of: (a) all persons who have or had rights to the same; (b) the nature and sources of SCO's rights in the same; and (c) efforts to maintain secrecy or confidentiality of the same.

INTERROGATORY NO. 4: For each alleged trade secret and any confidential or proprietary information identified in response to Interrogatory No. 1, Interrogatory No. 4 seeks information regarding each instance in which plaintiff alleges that IBM misappropriated or misused the same. In particular, this interrogatory seeks (a) the date of the alleged misuse or misappropriation; (b) the persons involved; c) the manner of misuse or misappropriation; and (d) the location of any method or code in any IBM product, Linux, open source or the public domain.

INTERROGATORY NO. 12: Please identify, with specificity (by file and line of code), (a) all source code and other material in Linux (including but not limited to the Linux kernel, any Linux operating sytem and any Linux distribution) to which plaintiff has rights; and (b) the nature of plaintiff's rights, including but not limited to whether and how the code or other material derives from UNIX.

INTERROGATORY NO. 13: For each line of code and other materials identified in response to Interrogatory No. 12, please state whether (a) IBM has infringed plaintiff's rights, and for any rights IBM is alleged to have infringed, describe in detail how IBM is alleged to have infringed plaintiff's rights; and (b) whether plaintiff has ever distributed code or other material or otherwise made it available to the public, as part of a Linux distribution or otherwise, and, if so, the circumstances under which it was distributed or otherwise made available, including but not limited to the product(s) in which it was distributed or made available, and the terms under which is was distributed or made available (such as under the GPL or any other license).

[1] The above Interrogatories were taken from Groklaw


SCO knew all along, before the court date in December, that Novell was contesting the ownership of SVRX. This may be why Novell only filed copyright and not a suit against SCO, since they probably didn't want to ruin any chance of SCO being squashed in the January 23 hearing.

Either way, the Judge better hand SCO's ass to themselves for their conduct in this case, especially the dribble of an excuse that was given for not complying with the cort order. Hell, just throw the suit out of the window, and let SCO battle it out with Novell.

The difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman is ..... the car dealer knows he's lying to you.

Seriously, it looks like Darl and the SCO Group really do believe what they're saying. A ponderance of the evidence, er <groklaw> groklaw <groklaw> hasn't phased them. A judgement against them in court still might not break the denial, nor would likely an expression of the meritless nature of their case by the judge (as in USL vs Berkley over BSD), and the subsequent collapse of their stock price.

The point is they're in denial, even since the bluff didn't work when IBM gave them the finger. Every wrong turn, every setback, every shred of evidence they've had ripped to pieces in public... only has served to strengthen their resolve and deepen the denial.

What you need is hopeless denial/delusion glasses. Simple lie/love detector glasses will be much too simple for SCO.

The asset purchase agreement in a much more readable form than the scrambled PDF on SCO's site:at Groklaw

I don't think I've seen attachment E before, but it appears to be a list of documentation, not software. I wonder if SCO thinks that owning the documentation for the ABI gives them ownership of the ABI itself?

No doubt Novell will file a countersuit. In fact, from Novell's correspondence it looks like Novell was preparing to file a suit over non-compliance with the purchase agreement. Maybe SCO saw it coming, and decided it would be better publicity to file first. Not that such a tactic will do SCO any good in the long run.

Seconded, thirded, whatever (yer honor i'll take another fifth please).
PJ's Groklaw is superb.

This has been discussed elsewhere (here on Slashdot, I believe, or maybe at Groklaw), that a contract != license.

Oh, yes, here it is: The GPL is a License, Not a Contract, Which is Why the Sky Isn't Falling.

pwned.

SCO did give IBM 60+ pages of "evidence", as far as we can tell.

groklaw.net

Do NOT tell them they must now releaes all their source code to the public.

If that's what you want them to do, then say so. Don't pussyfoot around. You can't force them to release anything that is whole-cloth theirs, but you anything that's a clear derivative of yours, their legal choice is to release the source, or face a judge.

Also let them know what if they force you to spend much more time onthe issue that you'll be charging just for your time. Remember that this is consulting rates, so $100/hour isn't even starting to get unreasonable.

It's probably worth mentioning that if lawyers start logging time, the price goes much higher much faster.

Send the message to the best contact you have at the company. If you can find their legal eagles, then CC the message to them.

I'd also CC a copy to a reasonably disinterested third party who would know to log the message for posterity. The FSF might be a good bet.

If they're distributing your code and/or documentation on the net , and they're clearly non-responsive, then you can also send a DMCA takedown notice to their ISP. (The law is there. You may hate it for other reasons, but it's a tool for you to use like any other).

Remember to stand firm on your rights. If they're using your code, you have the right to tell them to stop. If you're seriously pissed at them, you can simply tell them to stop distributing your code. If they refuse to stop, you can go to a judge and get an injunction against them (It would be in the context of suing them for copyright invringement).

If you want to get paid for the work that they've stolen, then decide how much you want per copy and ask them for it. Worst case is that they'll tell yo to drop dead and you'll be forced to go to court to get the money from them. Note: you can get more money if your copyright is filed... the sooner the better. Until the copyright is filed, the most you can get out of them is 'damages'.. which will (probably) top out at the actual price they are charging for the code. Once you filee, then the cap is the greater of actual damages and $30,000+ per copy. That $30L+ can be a pretty sturdy barganing tool.

Note: IANAL If in doubt, talk to a real lawyer. There seem to be a number of reasonably good ones at groklaw. Perhaps one of them lives in your area.

NoteL if you really don't think you are willig to drag these people thru court, then you can always assign your copyright to the FSF (or assign them the right to enforce it). At that point the FSF can start wailing on them with authority.

>>This nonsense is killing business, driving jobs overseas, raising insurance prices, and prices on everything in general.

rant/

I can't believe is what passes for "Insightful." Insightful comments do not simply parrot the anti-lawyer chant from Republican wing of the Republican Party, to mangle the Wellstonian line from Howard Dean.

Have you EVER seen a news report of a company say: "Oh, we moved those tech jobs to because we keep getting sued over our valuable ideas"? I haven't. (Probably because the trial lawyers have the media under their control!)

Look at those goobs at SCO. They been in the courts spinning like a dervish and how many companies have folded because of them?

Okay, this post has spun into Trollish, Anti-Moderator venting, but REALLY? Insightful! Insight into how repeating the same tired lines by the same tired pundits will eventually lead some folks to believe said tiredness, post it to /. and have it modded insightful. Did I mention the Insightful thing bugs me!?! /rant

You need to read the stuff that Novell just put out , they have their correspondance with SCO which is very illuminating.

Go to Groklaw and read the Asset purchase agreement yourself. You can see first hand, just how full of shit SCO is, and exactly what rights they have.

Novell never sold any patents to SCO, that is blatantly written in the asset purchase agreement. SCO probably has few if any copyrights to Unix, the document describes copyright transfer conditions, which SCO has not met. SCO and Novell have actually registered many of the same copyrights to the same Unix products (I have no idea who really owns them but both companies can't claim exclusive ownership of the same copyright). It seems what they really bought was the right to use and sell Unix, not own it free and clear. People are stupid, that is the one thing I have learned from all of this. It makes me wonder how many bogus lawsuits have been settled over similar bogus crap in the corporate world. It also makes me wonder just how smart these hotshot lawyers are. This whole episode shows me just how empowering a distributed network of people can be, like the open source community.

This was speculated on in an article at Groklaw, that this was the intent (aside from financing the anti-Linux FUD campaign) in M$ paying SCO for a license.

This was speculated on in an article at Groklaw, that this was the intent (aside from financing the anti-Linux FUD campaign) in M$ paying SCO for a license.

Ah yes, Grocklaw has it and some explanations of how it might be fought. But until it is broken it is unlikely that we will get access to the actual evidence.

I was under the impression, thanks to a Groklaw article, that you can't claim both copyright/patent AND trade secret. You use copyrights and patents to guarantee that nobody is allowed to duplicate your work because you are distributing said work in a very non-discriminating manner. (Giving it to anyone who will pay, basically) Filing a patent on something puts documentation on how it works in the public domain. For trade secret protection, you can't disitribute it unless you are discriminating about who you distribute it to. You also don't get the guarantee that nobody can duplicate your work. For example, the recipe for Coke is a trade secret, and anyone is allowed to buy a can reverse engineer it, and mass-produce the same thing for profit. The Coca-cola company doesn't distribute the recipe to anyone.

The Groklaw piece I read talked about the USL v BSD trial, and how USL tried to claim trade secret at one point, but were unable to prove they had distributed the code in a discriminating fashion. It also came out that since the code had been disitributed so long ago, it wasn't even copyrightable, which is a large reason why USL and BSD settled the case.

You are right, This information is requested by product, file and line of code. However, that's just #1 on this list. I still find 60 pages to be very short for documenting millions of lines of stolen code (as well as listing the full history of that code as required).

Why don't you just get a sales job at SCO and tell me, will ya? After all, if you are the IP sales guy, you are supposed to know exactly what IP you are selling, and what people are expected to license from you, right? Oh, and if you don't have enough response, please try faxing me and everyone else on slashdot with a sales pitch. We'd love to see SCO go the way of fax.com, assuming it'll survive long enough.

Answer found here, originally seen on Groklaw here (scroll to the bottom) by xtifr

thanx for asking!

Answer found here, originally seen on Groklaw here (scroll to the bottom) by xtifr

thanx for asking!

Actually didn't the judge already rule that discovery could be sealed from the public because it contained SCO trade secrets?

Ah yes, Grocklaw has it and some explanations of how it might be fought. But until it is broken it is unlikely that we will get access to the actual evidence.

Sorry, but I forgot to mention where the original post was...
It's here.

Dude! If you're going to karma-whore, at least mention the source!

Check this out.

a) all the code in Unix to which SCO claims rights and has been misappropriated by IBM, and

b) all the code in Linux, by file name and line number, that SCO claims rights to, whoever contributed it.

check out the rebuttal at groklaw.

Seems SCO took Novell's quote "appears to support SCO's claim" out of context...

It turns out that SCO have indeeed complied with discovery and turned over 60 pages. So much for the million lines of code. Read more as usual over at Groklaw

It turns out that SCO have indeeed complied with discovery and turned over 60 pages. So much for the million lines of code. Read more as usual over at Groklaw

Here is the groklaw story.

Unfortunately, the agreement will probably never see the light of day, for reasons of corporate confidentiality.

You would be incorrect. As text. If you want, you can find PDFs of the originals somewhere on Groklaw.

The Asset Purchase Agreement has been available on Groklaw for a while now. It was used by SCO as Exhibit in their original complaint.

Links to APA related documents (from Groklaw.net)
APA, APA Amendment 1, APA Amendment 2. TLA

The Asset Purchase Agreement has been available on Groklaw for a while now. It was used by SCO as Exhibit in their original complaint.

Links to APA related documents (from Groklaw.net)
APA, APA Amendment 1, APA Amendment 2. TLA

It would be useful to have a copy of the asset purchase agreement in front of you, since these letters mostly refer to it in their arguments. Luckily, it looks like it's been OCRed and put up on Groklaw at here. The letters in isolation don't really make much sense, hard to figure out who's blowing smoke and who's not.

We can Slashdot them instead... :-)

Mike

As is usually the case with SCO related news, Groklaw is picking the information apart. For now most of it is transcriptions of the pdf's, but also some first blush analysis.

As is usually the case with SCO related news, Groklaw is picking the information apart. For now most of it is transcriptions of the pdf's, but also some first blush analysis.

It is, in fact, somewhat telling: the file uses the exact same words as the Unix standard and the exact same numbers.

They don't. You can read Linus' history of errno.h here. Apparantly the x86 errno.h doesn't even use the same error codes as in traditional UNIX.

Moreover, if you care to look here you will find that for many of those architectures on which Linux is ABI compatible with UNIX you will find that a major contributor is an employee of Caldera, whose contributions were endorsed by his employee, for the explicit purpose of allowing "Linux to support binaries compiled for non-Linux operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or Sun Solaris."

It is, in fact, somewhat telling: the file uses the exact same words as the Unix standard and the exact same numbers.

They don't. You can read Linus' history of errno.h here. Apparantly the x86 errno.h doesn't even use the same error codes as in traditional UNIX.

Moreover, if you care to look here you will find that for many of those architectures on which Linux is ABI compatible with UNIX you will find that a major contributor is an employee of Caldera, whose contributions were endorsed by his employee, for the explicit purpose of allowing "Linux to support binaries compiled for non-Linux operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or Sun Solaris."

Yes, but we won't know anything about it for a while:

"I have been seeing a lot of expectations about Monday, but personally, I don't expect to know much until the next court date on the 23rd, if SCO is being truthful and actually does turn over significant answers and documents. SCO may have media pronouncements to make, but IBM has to look over what they are given and evaluate it and that takes time. They aren't given to trying this case in the media, so my best guess is that our next event in the IBM matter will be the court hearing."

From Groklaw

No they don't, and yes they can. That they would have to release their entire program is mostly Microsoft FUD. It is really just like any other copyright violation.

Groklaw has a good article on the subject.

Option A: If vendors feel so confident with the IP into Linux... they should protect end users with true vendor-based indemnification

Option B: If vendors are protecting users with vendor-based indemnifications... that proves they're not confident about the IP into Linux.

Thankfully all this crap will end soon

I think you've got it wrong. They should be turning over to IBM their discovery documents today, but we won't likely know anything about it until the next scheduled court date, Jan 23.

Check this article at groklaw

Isn't today ShutUP or PutUP Day for SCO?

Yes, but:

"I have been seeing a lot of expectations about Monday, but personally, I don't expect to know much until the next court date on the 23rd, if SCO is being truthful and actually does turn over significant answers and documents. SCO may have media pronouncements to make, but IBM has to look over what they are given and evaluate it and that takes time. They aren't given to trying this case in the media, so my best guess is that our next event in the IBM matter will be the court hearing."

From Groklaw

Tomorrow, according to Groklaw.

Yeah - he needs to read this article which explains the difference very clearly.

Darl says: 'No amount of money into a defense fund can protect somebody if they're the guilty party,' as you can read on Groklaw.

You need to calm down a bit. Over at Groklaw they "don't expect to know much until the next court date on the 23rd".

This announcement should add a new dimension to SCO's nonsense about indemnification.

That's link manipulation...

Just put 2 links into a lot of webpages

Extortion
SCO License

Did you mean: If enough people link to them, they will be... ?

Slashdot has links, ya know!